Filmmaker Yance Ford on Expresso (14 Jun 2017)

Filmmaker Yance Ford on Expresso

We recently had international filmmaker Yance Ford in the Expresso studio to talk about his documentary Strong Island. Strong Island recently appeared at the 2017 Encounters Festival and premiered at Sundance Film Festival. The film has also appeared at the New York’s New Directors/New Films fest

Yance is a transgender male from New York. He has been the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellowship, and was among Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2011. Yance worked as a Series Producer for the PBS showcase POV, for ten years. During his tenure there he helped acquire more than 16 Emmy nominations. Yance Ford also helped assemble the sculpture "Maman" by Louise Bourgeois, while working as a welder at Modern Art Foundry. It is part of the series of three spiders exhibited at Rockefeller Center, and now on permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

His film Strong Island, documents his family’s history from the dangers of the South to the Safety of being middle class New York citizens up until the death of his brother in April 1992, which set a series of deep racial issues, gun violence and injustice, into effect. His brother William Ford Jr was killed by Mark Reilly, a white 19-year-old mechanic. Even though he was unarmed, his 24 year-old brother became the prime suspect in his own murder.